There's far less there than the hundreds of entries for the UK or the thousands for the US but wikileaks leaks whatever it gets and if more US citizens are interested in that kind of activism then more US material will end up on there.

As usual, an un-informed comment from an American. The "we are good vs all the other are bad" speech, without even knowing what they are talking about. Wikileaks never followed any political agenda, they always published all they got about any one. Iran, Sweden, China, Russia are some of the previous winners of that luck.

My favorite feature of this round of Wikileaks is how it divides us. We now have the privilege of mostly being sorted into two rather neat piles:

A) This stuff should never have been secret, and anyone who would hide it is un-American

or

B) These secrets are property of the government, and anyone who would divulge them is un-American

The framing is succinct, and I doubt there will be another issue of this type within my lifetime. No matter which camp you're in, from a certain point of view, you're right. Personally, I hold that nothing need remain secret for very long, and that our government should be in the business of printing this material itself. Others are calling for Pvt Manning's execution.

Military secrets are the most fleeting of all. (Spock, The Enterprise Incident)

Here's the thing - nothing really can remain secret for long. At least, not from the guys you're actively engaged in fighting against. Beyond immediate operations, the only people you can hope to hoodwink for long are your own citizens by way of information control and propaganda.

Are there ethical (and practical) issues involved in releasing this info? Are there similar issues involved in not releasing this info? Certainly. But in all likelihood, the harm involved in releasing it will be very limited. Anyone who could make use of it in a military sense probably already knows most of this stuff. Not all...but probably most. So what remains? It seems like it would be reasonable to conclude that the main effect is to inform the American public and international community - people the American government very much wants to keep in the dark, but people who they have no right to keep in the dark.

Anyway, the cat's out of the bag now. Everything you're seeing is spin control - it's not like making a big fuss over this is going to make it be un-leaked. On the other hand, if the government puts a big enough spin on it, the odds are that they can strongly diminish any informing effect it would have for the public. They can't go back and hide it from the people they're fighting, but they have a pretty good shot of hiding it from their taxpaying voters and from the international community. Does it make any sense to hand them a win on that front? Any damage the info could do in a military sensehas already been done.

Here's the thing - nothing really can remain secret for long. At least, not from the guys you're actively engaged in fighting against. Beyond immediate operations, the only people you can hope to hoodwink for long are your own citizens by way of information control and propaganda.

It's not a given that every military secret will be discovered. Look through history and you'll find examples of secrets that were uncovered and secrets that remained secret for years. It all depends on the nature of those secrets and the actors involved.

Are there ethical (and practical) issues involved in releasing this info? Are there similar issues involved in not releasing this info? Certainly. But in all likelihood, the harm involved in releasing it will be very limited. Anyone who could make use of it in a military sense probably already knows most of this stuff. Not all...but probably most. So what remains? It seems like it would be reasonable to conclude that the main effect is to inform the American public and international community - people the American government very much wants to keep in the dark, but people who they have no right to keep in the dark.

I don't believe it's a given that there is not sufficient military value in this information. Nor do I agree that there is significant information for the public. I find the documents fascinating (and more than a few incidents described tragic) - but th

I wouldn't call for execution, but he's certainly due some discipline for disobeying orders. However, Julian Assange has done nothing wrong and the US shouldn't be hounding him. Instead, they should be investigating the abuses Manning and Assange have brought to light.

So the Taliban kills lots of random people they suspect might be working with the US, they don't really care how accurate they are, they just want to send a message that it isn't safe to work with the US. If they kill lots of random people who are just unpopular in their communities.

The US fails to keep the identities of it's sources secure, documents are stolen and sent to a foreign newslike activist organisation.

the Taliban continues to kill lots of random people they suspect might be wo

I wonder how many relatives/friends of MIA soliders will comb through these archives looking for clues as to their fate. (Just to clarify that I'm not being macabre for the sake of trolling - I support both wars and occupations, even though they ignored sane advice as to the troop strength required to hold and secure the regions.)

I think the whole problem with that kind of stuff is that the U.S. seems to have a highly emotionally charged "hero cult" around their soliders. On that background, who would want to tell a grieving mother that her son was hit in the back by a machinegun in a stupid accident and bled out before he got to intensive care, instead of dying valiantly in a final stand while severely outnumbered by enemy forces?

I support ONE war and no occupation. Our sole mission in Afghanistan should have been to remove the Taliban, period. We should have gone in, kicked ass, and left it in shambles. BTW, we still haven't found Bin Laden. Getting him should have been job #1.

We had no business whatever invading Iraq. The first gulf war, yes, but not the second.

So you don't cónsider the removal of a barbaric religious dictatorship cause in and of itself?

I'll leave that to the ethicists. But if we decide that's what we should do, we have to be consistent about it.

To take a different example. Saddam Hussein was a murderer, a warmonger, a war criminal, and all-around asshole. Did that justify us going in and nailing him? Perhaps so, but look how many other dictators behave the same way while we totally ignore them - if not actively giving them our blessing. (Hussein pretty much had our blessing until he f'kt up with Kuwait.)

If we're going to appeal to principle to justify our actions, we have to be consistent about it. Otherwise "principle" is just a convenient string to pull.

And we said--'OK. Security Council, they're not letting us in.' Nothing. Day goes by--'Excuse me, gentlemen, we're parked out in front of the agriculture ministry. They're not letting us in. We want to do an inspection.' Silence. Nothing.

This quote that you've copied is from an 1999 Frontline documentary [imdb.com], discussing events that happened in 1998 or before. You have to remember that a lot of things happened between the failure of the 1998 inspections and 2003. Operation Desert Fox [wikipedia.org] was one such measure. The guy who said it is Scott Ritter [wikipedia.org], who back in 2002 also stated:

There's no doubt Iraq hasn't fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by the Security Council in its resolution. But on the other hand, since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity has been verifiably eliminated... We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesn't necessarily constitute a threat... It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesn't amount to much, but which is still prohibited... We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can't close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously, we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capacity worthy of war.

There is no doubt that no significant WMD capacity existed in Iraq, we know this for a fact for two reasons: 1. The US military wouldn't have went in if anything like that would have existed. 2. Noone found any WMDs in the past 7 years.

The case for war was thoroughly fabricated [wikipedia.org] by supressing intelligence that didn't agree with the war and magnifying or fabricating intelligence that did. My favourite bits are:

In some cases, Cheney's office would leak the intelligence to news correspondents, who would cover it in such outlets as The New York Times. Cheney would subsequently appear on the Sunday political television talk shows to discuss the intelligence, pointing to The New York Times reportage as corroboration of his view.

The fact that Iraq's foreign minister under Saddam was an agent paid by the French who confirmed that no WMDs existed was completely ignored:

The CIA had contacted Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was being paid by the French as an agent. Sabri informed them that Saddam had hidden poison gas among Sunni tribesmen, had ambitions for a nuclear program but that it was not active, and that no biological weapons were being produced or stockpiled, although research was underway. According to Sidney Blumenthal, George Tenet briefed Bush on September 18, 2002 that Sabri had informed them that Iraq did not have WMD. Bush dismissed this top-secret intelligence from Hussein's inner circle which was approved by two senior CIA officers. The information was never shared with Congress or even CIA agents examining whether Saddam had such weapons.

What did the French get for their first hand intelligence that no WMDs existed in Iraq in 2003? Freedom fries, that's what.

i hear plenty of talk about how evil wikileaks are, for releasing the info, but not much talk in the corporate media or from our governments about the war crimes committed & subsequently covered up by the USA & UK.

so them inflated numbers of insurgents include how many woman, children and innocent men murdered exactly?

but not much talk in the corporate media or from our governments about the war crimes committed & subsequently covered up by the USA & UK

Actually, you hear plenty about it. It is spun into stories like "bringing democracy to Afghanistan," "fighting the terrorists who wish to hurt us" (and its utterly moronic sibling "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here"), "defending America," "helping Afghans resist the Taliban," and the rest of the claptrap promoted in the commercial media.

We had no reason to go into Iraq, now we're apparently saddled with decades of military occupation. We went into Afghanistan, ended Taliban rule, but allowed Al Qaeda top brass to escape into Pakistan. We are still fighting the Taliban, who represent no threat to us. If they once again become a threat, we remove them again. Why, however, did we not approach Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates about official and unofficial support of the Taliban and a variety of other extremists? What about Pakistan, funded officially and by means of private donations by SA and the Emirates to support the Taliban and other extremists? How do they end up being our allies in all this? Al Qaeda is still operational in Pakistan, apparently.

The War on Terror is a scam, backwards and forwards. It cannot withstand even cursory quetioning of its purposes or the means used to achieve them.

The existing WikiLeaks documents contain 10-digit grid-squares, allowing people to know the location of various military resources down to the square meter. This is absolutely not required for any sort of public purpose -- the public would be just as informed if you would omit the grid-squares and replace them with a vague location/district.

This can be done without wasting any manpower, something like this regex pattern will redact all collections of more than 5 numerical digits:sed -r s/'[0-9]{5,}'/'REDACTED'/g

If the grid-squares are broken into chunks with a delimiter, say '-', you can try:sed -r s/'[0-9\\-]{5,}'/'REDACTED'/g

As usual with regex, grep out the first 1000 or so matches for casual perusal before you let them loose.

There is really no excuse, including lack of manpower, for removing these sorts of details that add nothing to public's knowledge but reveal very useful operational details.

Assange doesn't care. His "harm mitigation" only covers people he believes are deserving of such protections, which does not include the US military. He has responded to criticism about outing Afghans who had cooperated with the US by saying that they had done unsavory things that may have constituted war crimes, as though he was judge, jury, and execution.

Unless say, your house was the one documented in an artillery strike and such a document could give you evidence that it was one specific faction or another that blew up your house and killed your family.

Or say that local Taliban leaders have been claiming that deaths were caused by the Americans, but no artillery or mortars were used by US forces in that immediate vicinity. These documents could show that the US is not to blame for everything.

In either case, when you're talking about the specific coordinates of small arms fire and an air strike from 5+ years ago, there is no risk to current operations.

Informants names shouldn't be in documents classified as 'Secret' anyway, they should be in 'Top-Secret' or above. As I said in the last thread on this. 'Secret' clearance is insignificant in the military. When I was active duty I knew an individual who was in under don't-ask-don't-tell, a couple of alcoholics, and even one enlisted guy that wound up getting convicted of dealing drugs, all with secret clearance. None of them were over the age of 21.

Secret classification is one step up from Sensitive (SSNs, addresses, phone numbers, etc...) and it isn't very well controlled. How else do you think some lowly E-3 is going to get his hands on tens of thousands of documents?

I'm sorry, I don't like the fact that we are there either, I wish we had never gotten into either, and I agree on your assessment of Iraq, but...

The US had (and still, to my knowledge, HAS) UN approval and support to occupy Afghanistan. Our prime suspect in a major terrorist act, one Osama Bin Laden, was strongly suspected to be in Afghanistan and the then-current government, the Taliban, was refusing the US entry to go find him and arrest him. The US, supported at the time by most of Europe, Australia, Britain, and a generous mittenful of others (many of whom also pledged troops in support of the mission, and some of whom still have troops there) entered Afghanistan to find Bin Laden. The force then met resistance from the Taliban and (under UN authorization) removed the government.

What went horribly wrong was twofold (and I'm sure my oversimplification is glossing over a lot of detail, too bad):

- Bin Laden then (almost certainly) fled over the border to neighboring Pakistan, possibly even before we invaded, and there was too much resistance to allowing the UN force to cross the border. There still is, and there's a strong suspicion he's still there. The invasion of Afghanistan might never have had a chance of accomplishing its stated goal due partly to the delays in getting UN approval and making it all legal. Making it legitimate probably made it ineffective. There's irony in there somewhere.

- Once the chase was done, there was little reason to stay in Afghanistan except to clean up the mess, and there's little political capital to be gained from cleaning up - successful invasions get votes, holding maneuvers get called "Vietnam III" and "Korea II" and get your ass thrown out of office. Unless, of course, you can have a successful invasion to cover it up.

Oh, yeah. Iraq.

- A false connection was drawn between OBL and Iraq, seemingly because George W Bush wanted to be able to resolve a problem (Saddam Hussein's long-running game of cat and mouse with the UN) that neither his daddy nor Clinton was able to resolve, and almost certainly because Afghanistan needed to stop being mentioned on the headlines. "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED", as they say.

- That invasion dropped visibility of Afghanistan in the eyes of the American public so we could forget we had a Vietnam going on. It also had the unfortunate side effect of reducing available resources to handle Afghanistan, and in many ways the job there was largely ignored and the country was allowed to degenerate further until we needed lots more resources on the ground to fix it all up.

The focus is on Afghanistan at the moment, since Barak Obama obviously wants to focus on the invasion that at least once had legitimate UN support and would rather not have people talking about Iraq.

1) Invade and occupy another country2) Dethrone the current government3) Get your own government/puppets in charge, especially easy if you can hold a "democratic" election where not everyone's represented4) Get new government to ask for your help

You'll have to point out to me the treaty all nations signed giving up the right to ever engage in war with another nation thereby making it "illegal". you do realize the term illegal implies that there is a law that is being broken right? That's the point I'm getting at here, that there's a difference between what you think is wrong, and what is actually illegal.

Iraq is an illegal war. Not by any international-law measure, but by American law. It was started by a rogue President who lied to the Congress to get the funding to wage it, and who had already transferred men, money, and material there from the legitimate Afghan conflict without their authority.

We gave the Taliban 43,000,000 dollars in May of 2001. This is because of their help with the War on Drugs. Only after 9/11 did we suddenly care about the Taliban's internal policies towards their population.

That's why wherever we go, we will be fought. The local population knows we'll only be there as long as is politically necessary. As soon as they are out of the local news, we'll be back to funding dictators and kings and not caring about who they are torturing to maintain order. Historical examples include Iraq (1980-1990), Iran (1953-1979), Saudi Arabia (present), Egypt (present), and unfortunately, I could go on.

Every war of aggression is illegal according to international law. Unless you think China could have legally invaded if they disagreed with the 2000 Supreme Court decision about the election, your argument does not hold water.

A War of Aggression [wikipedia.org] is a war waged without any justification of self defense and without being sanctioned by the UN security council. The concept was basically based upon Nazi Germany's expansionist wars, they made no claim to self defense and simply wished to take over the world. The Taliban's unwillingness to deal with an element within it's border's that attacked and killed 3,000 American citizens pretty much covers at least a 'justification' for self defense and the UN Security Council has in fact san

The Taliban offered to try bin Laden if the US could provide evidence. We rejected the offer, and invaded instead. Operating outside of established legal precedents for the sake of revenge does not justify the war in Afghanistan.

Holding up a UN vote to legitimize a US decision is comical, to say the least. The US does not care about the UN. Without our our support, in the words of Bush, they will become "an irrelevant debating society." A crime is still a crime even if a corrupt politician drops the charges on the gangster.

Actually the Germans made the rather absurd claim that Poland had attacked their forces. Just a bit of historical trivia that's rarely published in American history books. Not dissimilar to the sinking of the Maine or the Bay of Tonkin attack.

Another thing you won't hear on Faux News is that the Taliban offered to remand Binladdin to any third country for trial if the US could supply a minimal amount of evidence linking him or his organization to the WTC attacks. The Bush Madministration just insisted

Well, I grew up under US occupation. I get to say what I want when I want. I worship what I want when I want. I have enough security that I don't have to worry about being gun down in the street. I can go into a supermarket and buy just about anything I can think. I can make enough money to support my needs and even indulge in some excess material gain. At the end of the day, I even have time for a hobby or extra academic pursuit. Basically, I am free to be the person I want to be and enjoy doing that for a whole lot longer than any Afghani can. I didn't have a choice where I was born. I am sure lucky I was born here.

If I live in a utter shithole and the world's wealthiest and strongest nation decided dump a shitload of cash into my country because religious zealots who rule my life with fear and brutality wrongly figured that they could attack that country with impunity, I would do everything I could to advantage of that situation. I would take their money and build something, I would learn everything I could from them, and I would seriously question how things were done in the past. The way afghanis did it before brought about 30 years of war, poverty, and brutality and turn Afghanistan into an utter shithole. I would hope to make it better.

Dishing out some charity (financed by heroin sales and foreign donations) in order to win over population is not the way to build a sustainable economy. The job of the government (same applies to Afghanistan as does to US) is primarily to provide a stable rule of law (not arbitrary executions at the whim of the local mullahs). If the country has poor resources and is unable to produce anything worthwhile then it is probably going to be poor. There is no magical way for the government to change that and to conjure up wealth out of the rocks and sand. Taliban is a fundamentally inhuman organization that would sacrifice a million people in a blink of an eye if they thought that's what Allah wants. Their first concern is with their religious fantasies not with actual human beings. So please don't defend them.

A lot of Afghans felt that if they had a choice between Soviet occupation and the forces that the US was imposing in their place, they would prefer the Soviets.

I doubt that 1-2 million civilians killed during Soviet occupation would agree with that. Soviet version of pinpoint strikes involved flattening entire mujaheddin controlled towns and villages with carpet bombing. Btw, if you care to look at the history of Afghanistan, the disaster that it is now started with a leftist Soviet sponsored coup in 1978. Look up Saur Revolution [wikipedia.org]. The communists manage to so thoroughly exterminate the previous government and elite (corrupt but secular and reasonably centrist) and implement disastrous land reforms and forced state atheism that it ensured that the opposition to Soviets consisted almost entirely of Muslim extremists groups which were the only ones around to take over the moment Soviets left (which they would eventually with or without US assistance to the mujaheddin). So it's a reasonable argument that it was the Soviet Union that caused Taliban to come to power and that the US role was incidental.

No, an important value that a real spy provides is that you don't know you're being spied on, and you don't know what's been compromised. Publishing your secrets, while damaging, at least allows you to modify your behavior to avoid further damage.

What is sad is that releasing a ton of raw materials is what counts as journalism these days. You'd think it'd be possible for a journalist to go through it, digest what is relevant, hide what isn't relevant or is too dangerous to publish, and write a feature based on these facts. That way, we get the transparency we need to hold our governments accountable, and the people involved as still protected from harm.

I'll say again, this is simply a case of assassinating the messenger to disguise the message. Assange didn't collect these documents nor release them to anyone outside their zone of secrecy. Someone else did that. After the first time these were divulged, confidence no longer existed to be broken.

You're not alone in this opinion. The US government has come out and said basically the same thing, for likely the same reason. If we can make the man into a monster, we'll forget the good being done. Remember all the Scientology 'tech' they posted? Was that spying as well? Were they not exactly as monstrous on that day as on this one?

The elected representatives are elected to be our representatives so they can know for us. It's not a direct democracy.

Yes, but when our elected representatives tell us they are waging a just war on our behalf, waging it well, and not killing very many innocent bystanders, we need some knowledge of how truthful they are being so we'll know when to vote them out.

You're talking about two totally different things. An overall truthful reporting of general events in a war theater is fine and necessary. Revealing operational strategies and troop movements, etc., is what espionage is all about. Two completely different sorts of information. One is necessary for everyone to know, the other is absolutely necessary to keep secret so your fucking troops don't get killed every time they head out to engage the enemy. Are you seriously arguing that revealing operational plans a

I didn't exactly notice a whole lot of secret info regarding troop locations or transportation in the original Collateral Murder video - which is what started the whole Wikileaks vs US Government situation in the first place.

If perhaps they had redacted the documents like Assange had asked, if perhaps they hadn't tried to brush it ALL under the rug, if perhaps they haven't tried to make life difficult for Assange, and had instead acted a little more diplomatic about the issue, he probably wouldn't be releas

Sometimes, strategies that might otherwise be the optimal path to success are discarded because they violate your core principles. I'm sure that there are times and places where complete eradication of an opposing ethnic group/national population might be the way to gain dominance in a situation, but that doesn't mean that we should let ourselves devolve into that kind of animal.

Our country is founded on the concept of being a Representative Democracy. In order for that system to work, it requires the population to be fully informed of what is going on. Hiding operational details such as the actual count of civilian casualties works to keep American voters in the dark in a manner that ensures that they can't make a truly informed decision. "Just trust us" is only, ever, supposed to work until the end of a single term in office.

The person replying said that operational security (i.e., denying your enemy information about your troop locations, troop movements, supplies, and other capabilities) has been a fundamental tenet of good strategy during wartime since humans climbed down out of the trees and began fighting one another with pointy sticks. The less you know, the harder it is for you to anticipate the actions of your opponent, to guess what their capabilities and motivations are, and to guess where they're going to attack you next, or how they'll respond to your next attack.

Stating that this does not "make sense" or that it somehow is inapplicable just shows your tremendous naivete about anything related to military operations. Furthermore, your assertion that a web page where documents may be leaked heralds some profound change in our times also shows that naivete. Leaks during wartime have been around for almost as long as the "keep your information secret" rule. Wikileaks might make it easier to disseminate the information, but they are not doing anything new.

And for the record, I'm pro-responsible-leaking. I don't like that wikileaks rushed to publish this information and did a shitty job of redacting information that puts people at risk, but I don't fundamentally begrudge their right to report the information, so long as its done in a responsible & ethical fashion.

And for the record, I'm pro-responsible-leaking. I don't like that wikileaks rushed to publish this information and did a shitty job of redacting information that puts people at risk

I agree IF that's the case, but do we actually know that wikileaks put people at risk? I keep hearing over and over and over that there are all these Afgani sympathizers that have been outed but...where's the list? Who are these people?

The redacted docs are public for the whole world to see, yet I still haven't seen any list. It's just "US government officials say it's possible that...blah blah blah".

If he got hold of Taliban secrets, would you argue that it would be unethical of him to release them because it put Taliban solder's lives at risk? I highly doubt it.

What you are demanding, in effect, is that someone who is not from the US, who has no duty to have a loyalty to the US, take the US's side.

Now, it may be that the US is actually the cowboy in the white hat here, with its hands clean. And maybe the Taliban is the cowboy in the black hat. The reality is, though the Taliban (or any theocratic movement) is dangerous to liberty, we are NOT some shining beacon of freedom in the world. We fucking CREATED the Taliban, essentially.

You can like what Assange does, you can hate it. But he has NO ethical obligation to take sides in a war and make sure he protects the lives of combatants on one side while not protecting those on the other (and in fact, by protecting one, likely cost lives of the other)

He, as a non-involved party, can actually, ethically just publish EVERYTHING he can get his hands on, and let the chips fall where they may with regard to the two sides fighting. It's THEIR war, not his, and the results of their war is their responsibility and their problem.

You seem to be as one-dimensional in your thinking as the people that started this war. And then you put words in my mouth -- a hilarious attack strategy also usually only used by idiot conversations. You're a funny man. It's quite easy to google what ClintJCL (me) thinks about the war:

If you build a fortress and are the victim of a successful invasion the fault lies with you for not securing your fortress properly.This is the military.They are supposed to expect attempts to steal the information.That one guy could grab the entire database and release it into the wild shows how pisspoor their systems, both human and electronic, were.

They're supposed to keep their information secure, if they fail that means they fucked up.

Assange is only publishing what was already in the wild for several months, released there not by Wikileaks but by an unrelated wistleblower. You have a problem with that? Do you not understand that, for all we know, the Taliban already has the full text?

Posting names of informants risks the lives of both the informants and the soldiers who interface with them. It's entirely possible that a squad of US soldiers could show up at their informant's home a month from now to find a nasty little surprise waiting for them. If there is only a single type of information divulged with these leaks that should have been kept secret, the names of people helping the US military has to be it.

Do you actually know how many names where published in the previous part of the leaks of informants? You don't probably so I'll tell you. 3, only 3 names where present. 1 was already dead, 1 was a double agent for the Taliban. The 3rd I couldn't find info.

Mind you, this is the ONLY thing you can read, that actually HAS any numbers. Just check all the propaganda around and you see it's just "maybe putting in danger, countless lives", etc. None of those US newspapers, none, mentions any numbers. Says a lot about how uninformed or tendentious are the journalists writing those articles.

They're fucking collaborators with an illegal occupation force, what do they expect? Not to Godwin the thread, but French and Polish Resistance fighters who killed collaborators during WWII got medals. Rather expect the Afghan people will do the same when Karzai and his gang of thugs are kicked back to Miami.

The military, especially in times of war, doesn't work that way. There are risks and benefits to every action, getting in touch with an informant who may be compromised could easily provide enough of a benefit to be worth the risk, and that's even assuming the people with feet on the ground are aware that their source is compromised. If nothing else, Wikileaks denied the US military the intelligence that those informants could have provided, a consequence which, in an of itself, puts American soldiers are greater risk.

This statement must sound pretty funny to the soldiers themselves who know that they are mostly expendable. If anyone actually gave a shit, making Pakistani involvement public should have been enough to get them out of harm's way entirely.

I'm confused how you talk about the callousness of a general that would risk the life of soldiers to check in on an informant while in the same breath saying it's perfectly OK to let an informant who has risked his life to help your forces in the past hang in the wind.

But beyond that, yes, the soldiers lives do belong far more to the General to risk than some civilian from another country. Maybe you're confused about how an Army works, but there's these guys called officers and they make tactical decisions that risk the lives of soldiers. The soldiers don't generally get to volunteer for each mission individually and they enlist expecting to be commanded by officers into dangerous situations.

Actually, what whistle is being blown here? So far as I can tell, this is only the release of day to day operations material, and not something detailing corruption or war crimes. As such, this whole affair appears to be nothing more than to provide intelligence information to the enemies of the US and nothing more, and really, pretending that lives are not at risk from a massive leak of day to day tactical and operational information is disingenuous on your part.

If you don't think of them as an "asset" and instead think of them as a human, then you'll find that you do indeed show up at their home after they've been outed. This kind of behavior is called "not being a complete fucking douche" and is quite intelligent. And if you just can't find it in you to be respectful and to care about the people who you come in contact with, then perhaps there are other reasons for doing the right thing that you might find compelling. How about this: if you just wash your hands of the travails of the people who help you out, you'll find out that fewer and fewer people are helping you out. So, even if you are a complete fucking douche, it still makes sense to take care of your "assets."

I guess it depends on your point of view. Personally I think that countries where the populace is given the opportunity for self determination should do a lot more to help bring the rest of the world to those same circumstances.

In the case of Afghanistan you have to look at what it was like there while the Taliban was in control. For example, if you happened to be a woman or girl, living under the Taliban was a pretty shitty hand to be dealt. No education, no role in the public sphere, no rights independent

Err, no, I think they're both pretty s*itty situations. But if you're a women, living under Taliban rule was much, much worse.

You say that Afghan women were "safe" under the Taliban? What are you smoking.

I mean, the most recent copy of Time magazine floating in my house has a photo of an Afghan women with her nose cut off. Apparently she ran away from her wife-beating husband, and the Taliban went after her, held her down while her husband watched (and I assume cheered), and cut off her nose. She's currently residing with some care organisation, I believe, after they left her for dead.

I mean, the Taliban would rather they die slowly than get medical aid, because *gasp* male doctors can't treat female patients. Oh, and since women are denied education after the age of 8, it's hardly like they're going to become doctors, is it?

The thing is, any society like this is eventually going to run itself into the ground, or degenerate into some pre-Industrial revolution tribal free-for-all. The thing is, as developed Western countries, many of us find it somewhat difficult to stomach something like that happening in our backyard. That sort of widespread damage being caused to people...I think we have a phrase for that...hmm...human rights abuse?

Now, that wasn't the primary reason for ousting the Taliban - their support and harbouring of Osama Bin Laden, and continued funding for Al Qaeda was, but hey, it's not that bad a thing, what we're doing in Afghanistan, giving them the vote, and emancipating their women.

Also, it's funny how now that the American public has revealed themselves as spineless and without enough stomach to see things through to the end, and the US government has opened up the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. Guess who's screaming the loudest "NO! NO!" - gee, gosh, how about the Afghan people themselves? I think most of the 22 million people in that country wouldn't want that pack of sadistic and heartless sycophants back.

By exposing how one has acted and reacted in the past, it makes it easier for one to predict how one will act and react in the future. Also, it may be transparent to one who is not in the middle of the conflict as to how certain information can expose tactics, capabilities, and sensitive information. You ask for a specific example. I'd love to give you a specific example, but I think it's enough to state that the kind of information that wikileaks is getting a hold of is the kind of documentation spys we

The whole idea of wikileaks is that you don't have a damned choice about what's released or what isn't. Be grateful he's redacting something instead of complaining he's not doing enough! Assange isn't doing this to please you or get your approval.

a: the information was already out there and b: the gov't was supposed to release it via FOIA but has never done so. We're talking a 3+ year old FOIA request. Oh and c: that particular article has been covered before.

This is just straight up bullshit criticism because guess what? Assange is doing a better job than other news reporters because he's, you know, actually reporting news!

Yeah, nice try. RWB is a US neocon propaganda front, and If you had read the references you would have seen this:

After years of trying to hide it, Robert Menard, Paris-based Secretary-General of Reporters Sans Frontieres or RWB, confessed that the RWB budget was primarily funded by “US organizations strictly linked to US foreign policy.” [6] Those US organizations behind RWB include the Open Society Foundation of billionaire speculator George Soros, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Congress’ National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Also included is the Center for Free Cuba, whose trustee, Otto Reich, was forced to resign from the George W. Bush administration after exposure of his role in a CIA-backed coup attempt against Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez. [7]
As one researcher found after months of trying to get a reply from NED about their funding of Reporters Without Borders, which included a flat denial from RSF executive director Lucie Morillon, the NED revealed that Reporters Without Borders received grants over at least three years from the International Republican Institute. The IRI is one of four subsidiaries of NED. [8]
The NED, as I detail in my book, Full Spectrum Dominance:Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, was created by the US Congress during the Reagan administration on the initiative of then-CIA Director Bill Casey to replace the CIA's civil society covert action programs, which had been exposed by the Church committee in the mid-1970s. As Allen Weinstein, the man who drafted the legislation creating the NED admitted years later, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” [9]

So, stooge of the US neocon right, to be more specific.

RSF/RWB opposes Cuba's (and China's, Iran's,...) attitudes towards reporters (i.e. jailing, torturing, murdering). If that's a political agenda, if that's a bad thing, if that makes you a stooge of the US gov, then I'm afraid I'm a stooge too.

After all, you're familiar with these thousands of files so I'm sure you can put in the man hours to enable me to release them all to the public. Face it, you'd say "No, none of this stuff should be released so consider all characters in all files redacted."

Okay, and then the response is "Sorry, the majority of this stuff is getting released whether you want it to or not. Do you want a chance to help redact the truly sensitive parts, which you would know far better than me?"

Nice attempt at dodging the question. Are you seriously saying you would help someone who took your personal documents in redacting them so they could leak them on the Internet?

Not that I'm taking a stand either way, but to realistically expect anyone to want to willfully help someone redact information from documents that were stolen from you so they can leak them to the Internet is absurd.

He asked the US military to help him figure out what was dangerous to the US armed forces, and they refused and started trying to hunt him down and discredit him. He knows he's not an expert, but he's trying to at least make the best attempt he's capable of as a layman. Would you rather he didn't even try?

Now, if your position actually is that only the military has any right to determine what's classified and what's not, I think you're missing the point: The military can and does use classification as a way of hiding things that are embarrassing rather than actually dangerous.

Let met tell you something: if there were any intelligence analysts who had any pull in DC, we certainly wouldn't have given the region to Iran on a silver platter by taking out Saddam Hussein, or held Afghanistan responsible for a Saudi Arabian terror group's actions.

The pieces of shit [thinkprogress.org] who architected the war thought

1) We'd be greeted as liberators.2) Troops levels of several hundred thousand were "way off the mark"3) The war cost would be less than 100 billion dollars and paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.

My favorite is Rumsfeld's quote: "The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

Scapegoating Assange is the equivalent of yelling at the vet doing the necropsy on the horse.

The fact of the matter is, if you release this kind of information, then it's on you to go through and filter it to make sure that nothing harmful is released. If you can't do that, then the responsible thing is to not release the information at all (which is not unrelated to the reason the material was classified in the first place).

The fact of the matter is, there is such a thing as an information expert for a given field. If you're not an expert in the fiel

Convince someone on the inside to leak 15,000 verifiable documents on any of those situations, and I bet WikiLeaks would jump on it. They aren't necessarily "focused" on the US, as much as that is what's mostly been made available to them. If the Taliban had a structure that required and kept comparable records, WikiLeaks would probably publish those, as well.

Likely, he's too high profile and too obvious to kill. The CIA traditionally doesn't "assassinate" usually anyway (in the sense of a sniper with a rifle). Usually their targets have unfortunate accidents, like plane crashes (as they did with annoying leaders like Omar Torrijos [wikipedia.org] and Jaime Aguilera [wikipedia.org]). In this guy's case, it would probably be better to either discredit him somehow (i.e. something somewhat less crude than the Scientology-esque "He's a child molester, says ex-wife!" but along the same lines) or to

I always see this "list of civilians" or "number of civilians" retort but never have seen such a list. Please provide a source that shows this list of outed assets or please stop spreading misinformation.